Ru by Kim Thuy ****

Winner of Canada Reads 2015, a short read but very poetic, very intense. 

The Night Stages by Jane Urquhart ***

I was excited to purchase this and read it, because the setting was both Ireland and Newfoundland, and it was a family saga. It went a lot deeper than that, and I ended up somewhat bored by it all, but not enough to not continue until the whole novel was read.

There are two brothers, Naill and Kieran, Tam, who flew planes to various locations for the military during the war and who is Naill's mistress, Gerry- Anne, the Irish woman who raises Kieran after his mother dies and she is the only one who can calm down his rages of anger, Susan, Naill's wife. Tam is sitting inGander airport, having left Naill, and there she spends three days looking at a mural painted by the Canadian artist Kenneth Lochhead. We are taken into his preparation for this mural, too, although I'm not entirely convinced of its necessity in the plot.

So it gets three stars. She is a good writer, though, so maybe another half star for that!

The Love Story of Miss Queenie Hennessey: A Novel by Rachel Joyce *****

What a beautiful novel! This is the Queenie from The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the woman who Harold was walking to see after twenty years. Queenie fills  in a lot of the background to the first novel, as we learn all about her, how she met Harold, her relationship with Harold's troubled son, her illness, her fellow patients at the hospice where she now resides. And there is a lovely surprise at the end, too. I just loved this!